DEBATES, films, and drama serials set in the past, divisions triggered by different views of shared history, many books and more, show just how much of a hot topic history has become.
That has made the newly published book History’s Angel very timely and a clever new take on the popular subject. The new novel from Anjum Hasan revolves around a Muslim mild-mannered history teacher living in contemporary Delhi, at a time of religious division. He has to navigate family challenges with colleagues being suspicious of a Muslim teaching India’s history and an unthinkable chain of events plunging his life into chaos.
Eastern Eye caught up with the author of three novels and two short story collections to discuss her new book, which explores the life of Muslims in India, family and shared history.
What first connected you to writing?
It seems to have been a pre-conscious connection, but a few things helped to strengthen it – teachers for whom the English language was sacrosanct, a father in love with English literature, and my own inherent sense of escapism. Also, I didn’t have parents particularly ambitious for their children. So writing was less aspiration and more a state of being.
What inspired your new novel?
I wanted to write a novel about a teacher of history at a time in India when history is the subject of daily war. The scholarly discipline still retains its independence but in a colloquial sense history is now a clash between those supporting different mythologies. I wanted to write a comic novel about this, and ask the question: When is this fight just a debate on TV and when does it have its fingers on your throat?
Tell us a little about the story?
Alif is a middle-aged teacher in Delhi and the story follows him trying to keep things together – his job is on the line because he flies off the handle with a child, an old flame has suddenly resurfaced, his wife is very dissatisfied with their unhip standard of living, and his son is fed up of school.
How does this compare to other works you have done?
I have often written about people somewhat at odds with their worlds, not subscribing to radical politics but more like low-key liberals feeling out of place in the bright lights of new India and trying to articulate that befuddlement. Also, in this novel, that sense of displacement is sharpened to the point where it becomes a question of survival.
The cover of her new novel
What do you think is the biggest challenge you faced as an author writing this novel?
Finding a language to write about politics and history that is not the language of politics and history but one that takes in the everyday: the feel of a new pair of shoes, mixed feelings towards family and friends, the sights on a Delhi street.
Who are you hoping connects with this story?
Anybody who wants good fiction. I know that taste has become more rarefied and segregated, but I still believe that we don’t know what we like till we have read it.
What is your own favourite passage or moment in the book?
I like one of the early sections where Alif takes his students to see Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi and one of the boys goes missing. The contrast is between the grandeur of that historical monument and how a sudden intrusion from life can render it just a pile of stones.
What inspired the interesting title?
It’s from an image that appears in a famous essay by Walter Benjamin. The angel of history has his face turned longingly towards the past, but the storm of progress is blowing him towards the future.
What according to you makes for a great story?
A raconteur could tell a great story but in a novel the reader is usually looking for more – an absorbing plot, yes, but also a feeling of life refracted on the page.
Do you ever base any of your characters on real people?
Rarely. But I find that with each successive novel I am also moving further away from the familiar and so Alif and the other characters in History’s Angel are least like me in any obvious sense. At the same time, one knows what Flaubert meant when he said about his heroine, ‘I am Madame Bovary’.
What do you enjoy reading and do you have a favourite book?
I read and enjoy a lot of new fiction from India and elsewhere. But my favourite books tend to be the old ones. I was just cleaning my cupboard and came across a yellowed copy of Saul Bellow’s Henderson, The Rain King which is a perennial favourite of mine.
What can we expect next from you?
I am writing a book on Shillong, the town I grew up in, a sort of high-life and low-life portrait of a place that has been fascinatingly modern and is now increasingly provincial.
What inspires you?
The regular appearance of thoughtful, even powerful writing. Just now I am completely taken with Sara Rai’s Raw Umber, Yiyun Li’s The Book of Goose, and Irwin Allan Sealy’s Asoca.
Why should we pick up your new novel?
Because it’s trying to find a new, hopefully funny, way, to talk about an increasingly jaded Hindu-Muslim divide.
History’s Angel is published by Bloomsbury and available now in hardback. www.anjumhasan.com
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A seated Jain enlightened teacherAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Ganesha from JavaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
A Chinese silk painting depicting the BuddhaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
ArdhanarishvaraAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Head of a grimacing yakshaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
NagaAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
The Bimaran casketAshmolean Museum, University of Oxford
Hunia Chawla
A still from rehearsal
Them performing liveNajmuddin Saifuddin Qawwal Group
The cast of Marriage Material in key moments from the play, including Avita Jay, Kiran Landa, Omar Malik, Irfan Shamji and Anoushka Deshmukh
Sathnam Sanghera’s 'Marriage Material' adapted into bold new play on conformity
The play Marriage Material at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre is Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s adaptation of Sathnam Sanghera’s novel of the same name, which first came out in 2013.
She is lucky to have Iqbal Khan direct Marriage Material. The play, a co-production with the Birmingham Rep, is set in the late 1960s. Mr and Mrs Bains (played by Jaz Singh Deol and Avita Jay) run a corner shop in Wolverhampton. Their younger daughter, Surinder (Anoushka Deshmukh), is 16, her sister Kamaljit (Kiran Landa) is just a bit older.
They have a neighbour, Patwant Dhanda (Irfan Shamji), who, as we shall soon see, is not a very pleasant man. In fact, he comes across just as racist as Enoch Powell, who represented Wolverhampton South West for the Tories from 1950 to 1974.
It will be recalled this was a time when Sikhs working on the buses were told they couldn’t wear a turban. That was a hard-fought battle that had to be won.
The Bains, meanwhile, simply want to get their girls married off.
Nothing new here, I thought.
What makes the tale different is that the plot twists and turns down the generations. Mr Dhanda, who has the makings of a paedophile, makes a pitch for one of the girls when Mr Bains dies early in the play. “A life with no man in the house is no life,” he informs the newly widowed Mrs Bains.
Mr Dhanda has a wife but she has returned to India so he considers himself to be a free man.
Surinder’s English teacher from school, Miss Flanagan (Celeste Dodwell), who is also head of the fifth form, tells Mrs Bains about her daughter: “I don’t want to embarrass you, but she is bright. Ridiculously bright.”
She adds: “Mrs Bains, I think it would be a pity if Surinder didn’t stay on at school.” The initial response from Mrs Bains is not encouraging: “Too much education makes people’s brains get mixed up, they don’t sleep at night…”
But she is finally persuaded that Surinder should be allowed to stay on for a while longer before being married off.
Mr Bains was very old school. When Surinder confides she would one day like to be “a somebody”, he is amused that “my daughter wants to be a somebody”.
“Like you,” she tells her father.
Mr Bains consoles his daughter: “We will find a somebody for you to marry.”
At the point of a possible marriage, however, Surinder is sweet-talked by chocolate salesman Jim Wilson (Tommy Belshaw) into running away with him. They share a love of literature, and he calls her “Sue Bains”. But the relationship does not end well.
Once she has left, Surinder is written off as “dead” by her family. The story that is circulated is that she was only 16 when she was killed in a car crash. That’s better than to let on that she ran off with a white man.
By the time she is reconciled with her sister towards the end of the play, a great deal has changed. Kamaljit married Tanvir Banga (Omar Malik), a young man who helped out in the Bains’ corner shop. When the two sisters meet again, Tanvir has also died. But he and Kamaljit had a son, Arjan Banga (Jaz Singh Deol doubles up for this role after the death of Mr Bains). He has come home after his father’s death to help his mother who is still running the family corner shop.
Meanwhile, Mr Dhanda’s business has prospered. He now has a son, Ranjit Dhanda (the role is taken by Omar Malik after Tanvir’s death), and he is nearly as unpleasant as his father.
Arjan has an English fiancée, Claire (Celeste Dodwell). In London, Arjan worked as a creative director. But after deciding to stay in Wolverhampton to help his mother, he decides he cannot marry Claire because she is white. In other words, Asians are not free of racism, either. Happily, at the end, the couple are reconciled.
As for Surinder, she parted company with Jim Wilson after realising he was all talk, depended on her for money and had failed to earn a penny from his literary pretensions. She had prospered, though, as a hotel owner and had been transformed in time into a well-groomed businesswoman. After being tracked down by Arjan, she decides to return to her roots in Wolverhampton and help Kamaljit run the family corner shop. Perhaps 50 years had passed during the passage of the play.
Being subjected to racism turned some Asians into racists themselves. The word goreh (white person) is repeatedly spat out with venom. Maybe it is worth remembering the play’s audience isn’t exclusively Asian – white folk are watching as well. And maybe some of the toilet humour ridiculing white people, which always makes me cringe, could be cut out.
In Sanghera’s novel, there is a quote from Enoch Powell’s speech in November 1968: “The West Indian or Asian does not, by being born in England, become an Englishman. In law he becomes a United Kingdom citizen by birth; in fact, he is a west Indian or an Asian still... he will by the very nature of things have lost one country without gaining another, lost one nationality without acquiring a new one. Time is running out against us and them. With the lapse of a generation or so we shall at last have succeeded – to the benefit of nobody – in reproducing ‘in England’s green and pleasant land’ the haunting tragedy of the US.”
In Marriage Material, where the acting is marvellous (apart from Mr Dhanda’s Indian mannerisms and accent being overdone) we do travel across a couple of generations.
There is a scene when Tanvir rejects Mr Dhanda’s vision of creating a little Punjab in Wolverhampton.
Mr Dhanda wants to take over the Bains’ corner shop and is putting pressure on Tanvir to sign the papers. He says: “In this country, money is the path to freedom.”
“Sign, please,” he instructs Tanvir. “We must make sure our children learn to behave nicely, according to our rules.”
He insists: “We maintain our identity so we can be ourselves.”
Tanvir disagrees: “We can be us here. With the goreh.”
Dhanda warns him: “Then we will be inviting chaos.”
Tanvir’s comment is telling: “You sound like Enoch.”
Kamaljit, who is expecting a baby with her husband Tanvir, says: “I would like my child to grow up knowing the history of the Gurus and to read the Granth Sahib. And to love their culture.”
Tanvir tells his wife: “I would like my child to go to the finest schools, to cheer for England in the World Cup and eat Yorkshire pudding on a Sunday.”
Kamaljit sets out a dream that has perhaps come to pass with many third and fourth generation British Asians: “Maybe our child can do both.” Much, much later, in a throwback to the past, we learn of Surinder’s O-level results: “Biology A, Chemistry A, English Language A, English Literature A, French A, History B, Latin A, Mathematics A, Physics A…”
Kamaljit tells her younger sister: “Never mind about the B.”
And that is quintessentially Asian. Their acting is outstanding.
Marriage Material is at the Lyric Hammersmith Theatre until June 21, and at the Birmingham Rep from June 25-July 5